The Final Chapter of a Rhinebeck Baker Who Kept Bread Fresh for Forty-Two Years
After 42 years at the oven, Hollis Brenner is closing his bakery for good and sending his last hand-made bread bags straight to the people who will use them.
For three decades, Hollis Brenner quietly baked bread in a small workshop on East Market Street in Rhinebeck, far removed from mass production and marketing hype. His work was known mainly to locals and serious bread enthusiasts who discovered it through word of mouth.
I arrived at Brenner Bakery on a Tuesday morning in late June, just after the first loaves of the day had come out of the oven. The bakery sits on a corner of East Market Street in Rhinebeck, a two-storey brick building with cream lettering on the window and a handwritten sign taped inside the door: “Final Retirement Sale — Ends This Summer.”
Hollis Brenner was standing behind the counter in a cream apron dusted with flour, silver-grey hair combed back, sleeves rolled to the forearms. He is seventy years old and has stood in this same building, more or less in this same position, for forty-two years.
“You’ll want a coffee,” he said. “Cathy makes it. Sit down.”
I sat.
The smell of the bakery is the first thing that catches you. Not just bread — though there is bread, everywhere, cooling on wire racks along the back wall — but something underneath it. Warm beeswax. A slightly sweet, grassy note, the smell you get in a beekeeper’s kitchen. It comes from the workshop at the back, where Hollis and his wife Cathy make the small cotton bags that have quietly become the most requested item on their small website.
Those bags are the reason I drove up from the city on a Tuesday. Not the bread. The bags. And the fact that, according to a note posted on the bakery’s front door and on the website, there aren’t going to be many more of them.
Forty-two years, one bakery
Hollis opened Brenner Bakery in 1982. He was twenty-eight. He had apprenticed under his grandfather Elias — a Hungarian émigré who had baked in Poughkeepsie for most of his life — and used the modest inheritance Elias left him to buy the East Market Street storefront.
His wife Cathy joined him a year later. She is sixty-eight now, silver-white hair pulled back, softer voice than her husband, warmer eyes. She still handles the emails and the shipping, and, as it turns out, most of the stitching.
Between them, they have raised two children and one sourdough starter — “Margaret,” Hollis said, without irony. “She’s older than my daughter.” The starter lives in a jar by the oven and has been fed twice a day since 1984.
They have never taken outside investment. They have never franchised. They have never sold on Amazon. The bakery has been, for four decades, exactly what it was on the day it opened: two people, one oven, a starter named Margaret, and a stack of bread bags folded on a shelf near the register.
Why he started making the bags
The bags came later — sometime in the mid-1990s, Hollis thinks, though Cathy corrects him and says 1993.
“Customers kept complaining about the same thing,” he said. “They’d take a loaf home on Saturday, and by Tuesday it was rock-hard, or moldy, or both. The plastic ones we were giving out weren’t doing the job. Neither was paper. So one afternoon Cathy pulled out an old cotton flour sack her mother had used, and I remembered what my grandmother used to do.”
His grandmother, he said, had kept her breads in cotton cloth rubbed with beeswax. She had kept it up until the day she died. He hadn’t thought about it in thirty years.
He explained the mechanism to me the way he probably explains it to a curious customer at the counter. Plastic traps the moisture that bread releases as it cools; that moisture has nowhere to go, so it condenses on the crust and inside the bag, and mold sets in. Paper does the opposite — it lets moisture escape completely, and the crust turns to cardboard within a day. What you actually need, he said, is a fabric that breathes outward and holds inward at the same time.
“Cotton rubbed with beeswax does exactly that,” he said. “It’s what village bakers in Europe used before plastic. It’s what my grandmother used. It’s not a new idea. It’s just an idea most people forgot.”
It took him three years to get the wax ratio right. Too little, and the crust dried out. Too much, and the bag smelled like a candle. In 1996, he made his first fifty bags, folded them on a shelf by the register, and started handing them out with loaves.
He has been making them, more or less the same way, ever since.
Three people in a workshop
The workshop is at the back of the bakery, through a door behind the counter. When I visited, Cathy was at a small table by the window, stitching a drawstring channel onto a cream cotton bag with the kind of unhurried attention that comes from having done the same thing many thousand times.
There are three people involved in making a Brenner bag. Hollis presses the wax. Cathy stitches the seams, the drawstring channel, and the walnut-brown label that reads BRENNER BAKERY EST 1982 HUDSON VALLEY NY. And Tom Reilly, a beekeeper who has kept hives in Red Hook, six miles up the road, since 1994, supplies the wax.
Tom stopped by the workshop while I was there — sixty-something, quiet, a canvas jacket and calloused hands — dropping off a fresh block of amber-coloured beeswax wrapped in wax paper. He and Hollis have worked together for twenty-eight years.
“It’s not a business arrangement,” Tom said, when I asked. “It’s a neighbourhood arrangement. He needs wax, I’ve got wax. That’s it.”
Every bag Cathy stitches gets a small penciled number on the inside of the linen label. Hers, she said, is her only complaint about the process.
“My handwriting has gotten worse.”
When I visited, the tag on the bag she was finishing read 4,342.
“Four thousand three hundred and forty-two bags,” she said. “That’s forty-two years of bread wrapping.”
Why are they closing now?
I asked Hollis, over the second coffee, why he was closing.
He took a while to answer.
“I’m seventy,” he said. “Cathy is sixty-eight. My hands aren’t what they were. And our granddaughter Hattie is six years old. I taught her woodwork last spring — she’s got small hands, she’s careful with a chisel. I’d like to teach her more than that before she’s too old to be interested.”
He wasn’t sentimental about it. Neither was Cathy, when I asked her separately, later.
“There’s no one to take it over,” she said. “Our children have their own lives. And we don’t want to sell the bakery to a stranger who’d stamp our name on something we didn’t make. It’s easier to just stop.”
The last loaves of bread will come out of the oven at the end of the summer. The bakery itself — the building on East Market Street — will be sold, probably to a coffee shop, Hollis said, dryly. The bags will be the last thing to go.
The last batch
I asked how many bags were left.
Hollis walked me into the workshop and pointed to a wooden shelf behind Cathy’s stitching table. There was a folded stack, maybe two feet high, of cream cotton bags wrapped in kraft paper.
“That’s about half of what’s left,” he said. “The rest is boxed up in the back.”
He and Cathy had decided, when they made the retirement announcement in April, that the remaining inventory would go straight to households, not to wholesalers.
“A distributor offered to take the whole lot,” Hollis said. “He would have marked them up and sold them on his own website. We said no. Cathy was firm about that.”
Cathy nodded. “If it’s the last batch, it should go to the people who’ll actually use it. Not sit in a warehouse.”
So they cut the price. Every order ships as a pair — Buy 1 Get 1 Free — for $34.95 total. Shipping in the U.S. is free. There is a 90-day money-back guarantee, which Hollis pointed out is a little absurd given that the bakery will be closed within three months.
“If you don’t like it, send it back. Cathy or I will still be here to answer the email.”
When the bags are gone, they are gone. There will be no restock, no second run, no re-launch under new ownership.
I left the bakery around noon. The last thing Hollis did was hand me a small loaf, wrapped in one of the cream cotton bags, with a handwritten card tucked into the drawstring. The tag on the inside of the label read 4,343.
I drove back down the Taconic thinking about my own grandmother’s kitchen, which had, now that I thought about it, smelled a lot like Brenner Bakery.
If you have ever thrown out half a loaf of good bread because it went hard, or moldy, or both, before you could finish it, the Brenner bag will change how you store bread for as long as you have one. And if the bakery on East Market Street means what Hollis and Cathy say it means, this is your window to take one home before the door closes for good.
